


Zweitausend Ganztaktpausen

by PresquePommes



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-07-14
Updated: 2015-07-14
Packaged: 2018-04-09 08:57:18
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,291
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4342205
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PresquePommes/pseuds/PresquePommes
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Zweitausend Ganztaktpausen." </p><p>Translates to: "Two Thousand Bar Rests" or, perhaps more accurately, "A Damn Strong Indicator That The Show Is Over." </p><p>Inspired by grloul's Time Listens. A story about waking up the same person in a vastly different world.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Zweitausend Ganztaktpausen

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Time Listens](https://archiveofourown.org/works/4091446) by [grloul](https://archiveofourown.org/users/grloul/pseuds/grloul). 



> Split into two parts.
> 
> The title is kind of a tongue-in-cheek joke that came out of having no idea what to name this fucking thing.

In seeing him haloed by the light of a world he’ll never reach, he’s struck by the thought: in this moment, he knows Eren Jaeger as well as he ever will.

As well as anyone ever will, maybe.

He’s heard their eyes may have met once before the Wall fell, when Eren was still young, but he never knew him before his heart was changed by the futile rage of grief.

His sister never says that he was gentler then, more foolish and less afraid, but she has never had to. There are moments when the shadows in his head seem to lessen, and buried deep beneath the rubble there is what he suspects to be the ghost of a boy far more invested in his daydreams of one day having a hero’s triumph than he is in not taking for granted the mundane warmth of a life he assumes will always be there to come home to.

But he never knew Eren before the Wall fell.

The Eren he knew first believed the world was painted cleanly in just two shades of moral decency, that good and evil had edges sharp enough to cut each other when they touched, and that heroes never sank to pretended villainy without a guarantee it would make the world a better place.

The Eren he knows now knows enough to know better- he’s learned to leave the bodies of the fallen behind him on the grass.

Sometimes Levi wishes he hadn’t, but he does not regret coming to know this Eren as well as he has.

They’ve both shouldered the weight of a desperate world, where hope is fragile and men are clumsy with greed.

They’ve carried the burden of death on their hearts, which know too well that any life can end between one breath and the next.

They’ve been through hell together just as surely as they’ve been through hell alone.

He knows Eren well enough to have recognized the dull glint of relief in his eye during their last briefing. He knows this will be Eren’s last titan shift.

He knows Eren’s sister knows, and believes he will bring her brother back to her. He also knows she’s wrong.

Closing the Shiganshina breach will be enough. Eren will have done enough, then.

They will have both done enough.

They are both very tired.

When Eren turns his back on the outside world, taking one last look back to the one he’s leaving, Levi looks up at him.

They both know he’s fast enough to escape this if he wants to.

Haloed by the light of a world he’ll never reach, Eren only hesitates for a second, and then his halo disappears.

And with it, so do they.

***

The first time he has a thought, it’s that he must be suffocating.

It doesn’t bother him, the idea- it’s just his luck, he thinks, that he was trapped instead of killed immediately.

Hanji would find the information exciting.

He feels a momentary twinge of guilt for not telling them his intentions. Truthfully, he couldn’t have- they would have tried to stop him.

He’s very tired.

He lets himself drift back to sleep.

***

The second time he has a thought, it’s that he seems to be taking an annoyingly long time to die.

Nothing hurts. He really can’t feel much at all except for his own breath washing back on his skin when he exhales.

He doesn’t open his eyes.

He knows the difference between feeling and actually seeing the way he’s trapped himself.

He keeps his eyes closed and drifts off, again, to sleep.

***

The third time he has a thought, he’s beginning to consider the worrying possibility that he’s going to spent the rest of eternity drifting in and out of consciousness in a crystal prison.

He finds the idea obnoxious.

If he’d at all suspected that might be the case going into this, he would’ve found some other, more orthodox way to retire from his duties.

He mulls it over for what feels like it might be a long time until he realizes that time might mean nothing anymore, and then supposes, very calmly, that he might as well make peace with his lot.

The first time he opens his eyes, they can’t quite process what they’re seeing.

There’s nothing wrong with them, as far as he can tell- it’s just that he’d expected something very different.

He can still feel the closeness of the air around his face, but what he can see in the faintly blue dimness of his surroundings seems to suggest the existence of much more space than he’d anticipated. About an arm’s length away, he can see a rounded wall, but following it downwards with his eyes yields a strangely distant and bizarrely angled floor.

All at once, his sense of spatial orientation reasserts itself rather rudely, and he has a series of abrupt realizations:

He is on his back, facing upwards.

He is not lying on anything solid, but he doesn’t seem to be falling.

He is partially submerged in what seems to be water.

Everything begins to ache as soon as he tries to move. It isn’t the burning pain of overexertion or the dull throb of healing injury- it’s a sullen sort of ache, the way his body feels after too long spent sitting.

The way he feels after a day spent keeping up appearances for Sina nobility.

He spends a long time curling and uncurling his fingers and trying to decide why it bothers him so much that he can’t tell if the water he’s floating in is warm or cold before he brings his arms closer to his body.

He touches himself cautiously, unsure of what he’ll find, and realizes he’s naked.

He’s fairly certain he wasn’t naked when Eren closed the breach.

He generally considers himself someone who can be relied on to wear clothes, and while a mysterious compulsion to strip them off immediately following combat might not actually be the strangest eccentricity in the Corps, he can think of at least three people who would not hesitate to comment if he were to show up in a state of undress, and quite a few more who would not be able to resist the urge to stare.

All that being as it is, he is at least fairly certain his ass was not bare to the wind when Eren closed the breach, which he recognizes as meaning that someone else, or something else, must have removed them from his body while he was sleeping.

He begins to feel a sense of paranoid urgency.

When he brings his hands up to his face, the crook of his left elbow twinges. There’s something smooth covering his mouth and nose. His fingers find something closer to the base of it- a thick wire or a tube. He tries to follow it to its source and runs out of reach. He cranes his head to look, rolling his shoulder under him.

The motion unbalances him, sending him deeper, but the water is shallow. He finds the bottom with his heel as he tries to right himself.

He struggles to get it under his feet. His body feels strangely buoyant, like the water is intent on floating him. He objects to this.

His legs ache. His elbow twinges again.

He looks at it. There’s a square of strange fabric covering the source of the pain. It’s a few shades paler than his skin.

He crouches in the water and traces the line connected to his mask to an opening in the wall behind him. The tube is clear, like window glass, and he can see faint light filtering in through it from the outside.

Here, beside it, he finds what looks like a door.

He pushes on it. It is not locked or obstructed, but it turns out to be a very strange sort of door- rather than swinging outwards like it rightfully should, it doesn’t swing at all, just pops out of its frame and bounces on its tracks.

 _‘Tracks_?’ he puzzles, second-guessing himself even as he’s grabbing the door by its bottom to stop it from falling closed again, but when he tries to slide it up along them, the way he assumes he’s meant to, it just seems to grow heavier in his hands the more he strains to lift it.

With the door barely rising and the ache in his muscles already shifting from a cramped stiffness to an outright burn, it occurs to him that if he can’t get it open, he really will be trapped. Without the promise of a quiet suffocation, the idea has less appeal than it did.

Starving takes a very long time.

He wedges his shoulder under the door and shoves it up with all his force.

It doesn’t actually move the door any further than it was already moving, but it does cause something to whine disapprovingly at him from what sounds both very near and like it must be Walls away. He scrambles back, startled, and watches dumbfounded as it continues to crawl open, all on its own, until it’s disappeared completely over the top of his-

 _‘Cell?’_ he thinks sluggishly, arms rubbery. Other words occur to him. His head feels muddled and slow.

His skin prickles in the slight chill carried by the air creeping into his- ‘ _bathing chamber?’_ -but it’s the only difference between inside and out that he notices immediately- his scrambling has left him floating again, this time away from the door.

As he struggles against his own buoyancy, what he can see of the space outside tells him it’s still dimly lit, maybe just a little less so, and he still can’t hear anything but the drumming of his heartbeat and the oddly muted sounds of his body disturbing the water he woke up in.

With the ambient hiss of the door gone, he suddenly realizes he can’t hear his own breathing- hasn’t been able to since he woke up. He finds this disturbing.

He considers that his ears might not be working right and then immediately dismisses the idea as impossible.

This does not stop him from knocking on the wall of the- _‘…?’_ -with his knuckles and feeling relief at the predictable- if worryingly subdued- sound it makes. _‘Must be water in the ears.’_ He thinks he can feel it.

He creeps forward to peer out, to see if anyone around to have heard his thrashing, but a glance tells him that he’s alone, both in and outside of the-

_‘Stop.’_

His head hurts. He’s beginning to feel irritated as well as muddled, slow, and vaguely paranoid.

He stops questioning where he is.

All he knows is that he is not where he thought he’d be, and therefore probably not where he wants to be.

Preoccupied with escape, he forgets about the mask- remembers it again when the tube taps politely against his stomach as he tries to hoist himself out.

It’s still tethering him to the inside wall. He fights down panic.

He traces the edges of the mask with fingers made clumsy by agitation, following a pair of disconcertingly slick strips of material under and over the curve of his skull. They don’t break when he yanks on them, but they do stretch. He doesn’t expect this.

In his surprise, he releases one accidentally. It snaps him in the nape of the neck.

After nothing but lukewarm water and wet-dampened sounds, he almost relishes the decisiveness of the sting.

His second attempt to remove the mask is successful, but in his eagerness to get it off, he jostles something- feels it shift in the canal of his right ear.

He drops the mask in the water and scrabbles at the sides of his head, yanking loose delicate-looking plugs and reeling at the sudden onslaught of noise their removal brings.

He braces himself against the wall and just stays there for a while, body shaking and breathing unsteady, until his mind stops sending up panicked flares over the stimulation.

The air tastes faintly of something familiar. He sniffs his fingers cautiously, and then reluctantly licks them.

He looks down into the water at himself, bemused.

Climbing out is harder than he suspects it might have been if he hadn’t put so much strain on his arms and shoulder, but there are handles by the outside of the door. He is not too proud to cling to them.

Standing up turns out to be a feat it’s never been before- his body feels a size too small, like his muscles have been wound tight around his bones. When he starts to shake, he’s not sure if it’s from the exertion or the cold.

He discovers he can walk if he takes slow, careful steps, but the time between lifting a foot and putting it back down again feels so precarious that he finds himself lunging for objects to lean his weight on.

After one of his knees buckles, he ends up clinging to the top of something that is unquestionably- reassuringly- a desk, and it’s there that he decides to take a moment to collect himself. It takes him longer than he’s proud of to make his way around and into the chair, but sitting down is a reprieve heavenly enough to almost make him forget his shivering.

As he leans more of his weight onto the surface of the desk, his elbow shifts a stack of what he hadn’t recognized as pages, and they spill sideways across it. He watches some of them disappear over the edge and has a vague thought about a deck of playing cards. He can tell at a glance that they’re made of something that’s not paper as far as he recognizes it.

They’re pages, to be sure, but he’s never known paper to be translucent without light behind it, and he’s certainly never known a sheet of it to have that faint sheen without the benefit of a freshly spilled drink.

The closest thing he can think to compare it to is the pale amber glass of a bottle he once saw on a shelf over a barman’s shoulder. He remembers it vividly- he’d never seen glass blown thin enough to not obscure the level and colour of the liquid it held.

He remembers thinking it looked just like the brownish runoff of the streets in the underground did when the frost came, kept so still and level by a delicate sheet of yellowed ice.

He touches it almost without wanting to, fingers drawn to its surface by a piece of himself that can’t seem to decide if he’s reaching for the bottle or the ice.

It’s slick under his fingers, but not cold, and not quite like the straps of his mask- less slippery and elastic, but close. He squints at the page closest to him, and then uses a palm to pull more from the gambler’s fold of the fallen stack.

The numbers he knows, and most of the script is at least superficially familiar, but all of the words look like nonsense except for one:

 _Levi_.

The same jumble of incomprehensible characters mark the first corner of every page, and adjacent to them is his name. He stares at it blankly.

He can see the _thing_ he woke up in lurking in the periphery of his vision- it’s squat, off-white, strangely egg-like except for the door that’s nestled itself on the top of it.

He steadfastly ignores both it and the rising urgency of his shivering.

He’s still trying to puzzle out some sense from the pages when he hears something new.

His ears are sensitive to voices. They had to be when he was young and small and able to face two adults in a fight, but not three, and they have to be now, when the pitch and intonation of a teenager’s laugh might say more about whether or not they’ll freeze at the sight of a dead comrade than anything else will.

He’s spent long enough in the filthier parts of the world to know the intonations of these giggles instantly.

His eyes trace them to behind a door in the far wall- it’s painted precisely the same shade of white as the wall beside it. The handle is an unassuming matte grey.

The instant he recognizes it for what it is, he spots another in the wall to his left. Without even meaning for it to, he finds his mind fixating on it as a possible escape route.

It takes him a long time to stagger to the first door, but by the time he gets there, he thinks the tightness in his legs might be easing. He presses an ear to it.

His ear hears nothing, but his cheek discovers that the top half of the door is covered by a thick cloth shade- white, just the same white as the door and the wall- and under it, he finds a narrow glass window. He finds this strange to begin with, and only stranger still when he peers through it into a brightly-lit white hallway. It’s empty.

He can’t puzzle out why anyone would need to see through a door that doesn’t lead outside or into a prison cell, so he stops trying and moves on as soon as he establishes that the doorknob will turn if he tries it.

It doesn’t seem to take him quite as long to get to the second door- by the time proximity has sharpened the whispers into unfamiliar words, the hand he has braced against the wall is less for support and more for reassurance. His body isn’t shaking because of the exertion anymore- now it’s just shaking because of the cold.

With another door comes another cloth shade, another window. Behind this one is a room not much brighter than the one he hands in, a room with another desk, more glossy, thin-blown pages, and what thinks might be a man and a woman.

The giggles have tapered into gasps and he can tell at a glance that they are doing what he expected them to be doing, silhouetted by what seem to be brightly-lit windows without walls or doors to be set into and see through, but all of which see somehow into rooms and hallways and small spaces, nonetheless.

He recognizes the image on one of them as the place he woke up in- he can see his mask floating on the water.

He glances cautiously at the lovers in front of it, asking himself if of them will look and find him gone, if they’ve looked already and aren’t bothered, but all his scrutiny gives him is a clear view of a naked back, a bare leg, a socked heel, and a feeling of vague disgust.

The doorknob turns. The door opens- slowly, as he willed it to, and silently, as he’d hoped.

His eyes find an abandoned coat on a chair beside the door.

He takes both- ‘ _slowly, silently’_ \- and closes the door- ‘ _slowly, silently’_ \- on the lovers.

 _‘Not so slow, not so silent,’_ he thinks as someone strangles a pitchy whine. He wonders if he really needed to go to all the trouble of being stealthy.

He lodges the chair under the doorknob. He knows it’s not much of a barrier, but it gives him some sense of security in a strange place that’s offered him little.

The coat is enormous on him- he’d find it funny, under other circumstances. Now, though, the waxy fabric swallowing his knees and hanging loose around his hands gives him a sense of comfort not limited to the warmth it provides.

He rolls the sleeves up methodically and wraps the body of it tightly around himself, holding it closed with a hand.

One last glance in the lover’s room of strange windows assures him that they are still thoroughly occupied.

He doubles back to the door in the left wall and looks through its window again.

The hall is still empty, and the doorknob still turns in his palm.

It takes his eyes a moment to adjust to the glare- it’s somehow brighter than it seemed through the window. He blinks against spots of light, and when he’s finished blinking, he looks.

The hall he stands in isn’t vast, but the corner he creeps to and peers around opens into a hallway that seems impossibly long, impossibly white, and filled with impossibly many identical doors. There are markings on the wall, here and there, words in that same nonsense language that surrounded his name on those pages on the desk, and a red sign affixed to the ceiling at the other end of the long hall.

He doesn’t understand how it can be so long- a building this large would stand out in their little world. A place like this couldn’t be hidden. It would be known about, speculated about. Even in Sina, he’s seen the grand manors of the rich for what they are: hulking things that cast titanic shadows across the squat buildings that surround their estates. Eyesores that lurk in the corner of everyone’s vision, impossible to overlook and difficult to ignore.

He’s stood in the doorways of ancient churches and stared between the rows of pews down aisles shorter than this single hall.

This long white hall.

He retreats from it and creeps past the door he came from to the other corner.

Around it is another hall just as long as the first, but immediately to his left is a door, and on it is a symbol he’s never seen but recognizes intuitively.

Stairs.

The familiarity of it is a sweet relief. He glances cautiously at the many closed doors stretching down the walls before him, daring one to open, before darting across to the door with the green and white picture of stairs on it.

There’s something incredibly comforting about the faint smell of dust that pervades the stairwell- it’s the eternal smell of clean but poorly ventilated spaces, the smell of cellars and basement and dry wells.

The floor is strange under his feet, springy like wet earth but smooth and dry. He pays this very little mind.

He goes up.

It never even occurs to him to go down.

On every level, he passes another door into another hallway like the one he left- on the third, he glimpses dark hair and freezes, but the woman turns and she is not Mikasa.

The eyes are right, as is the chin, but her skin is darker, her eyebrows more delicately arched, and her mouth seems made for smiling.

He has never seen someone who looked as much like Mikasa as this woman does, but he knows it is not her, and so he moves on.

He’s five floors up and his legs are starting to murmur complaint when the alarm sounds.

He assumes it is an alarm- it must be. There’s a peal of sound and a voice, not shouting but louder than a shout, and though he doesn’t understand the words, he knows the tone.

There’s urgency in that voice.

He doesn’t question whether or not he is the cause of the alarm. It doesn’t really matter.

He reaches the last floor, and through the window in the door he can see blue sky, but the door’s handle- a strange bar he tries to pull before he thinks to push- only releases one bolt of two, and the door will not open.

He retreats back down to the floor below, hesitating for only a moment at the door before darting through it- he can hear a commotion growing faintly outside one of the stairwell doors on a floor below.

This hallway is not white, but blue, and for all its similarities to the others, it is not empty.

Someone on the other end of it makes a startled noise at his entrance- he goes to dash around the corner, only to have a body round it and nearly come crashing into him.

He strikes out at them without considering whether or not he should. He starts running without checking if they’ve fallen or not.

His shoulder aches. His legs are screaming.

He rounds the second corner to find watchful-looking men and women dressed in stern blue vests emptying into it from behind a metal door, and doubles back urgently.

One of them makes a grab for him.

He punches them. This time, it is wholly intentional.

“Captain Levi!”

He knows this voice.

The call makes him hesitate just long enough for someone to grab him around the waist.

Even as he’s struggling against that hold, he’s craning his head to look. It’s in the length of throat this action exposes that he feels a clumsy pinprick.

He’s too preoccupied to think much of it.

_‘Eren?’_

When he sees him- the furrow of his eyebrows, the set of his jaw, the way one shoulder sits higher than the other when he’s shifted his weight onto his right leg like Levi’s always told him not to- he’s so familiar as to look jarringly out of place in such unfamiliar surroundings.

It occurs to him then that his coat has fallen open.

After that, nothing occurs to him at all.

***

The fourth time he has a thought, the thinking part of his brain isn’t quite thinking yet.

He wakes up swinging- or trying to, at least.

He blames the intensity of his reaction on the restraints. He’s acutely aware of their presence before he’s aware of anything else, and the feeling of them against his skin has filled him with such a pervasive sense of restless agitation that even the murky remnants of his fading dreams are flavoured with it.

He can feel the bruises forming on his forearms by the time he’s cognizant enough to recognize the face behind the hands trying to still his thrashing.

“Eren,” he croaks, and then flinches.

His throat is raw. He’s not sure if it was when he first woke up- he hadn’t really noticed it before he’d tried to speak.

He swallows, grimacing.

Eren squeezes his shoulder reassuringly, easing him back into a reclined position.

“Yeah,” he’s murmuring, “yeah, it’s me. Hey.”

Levi stills, but when he looks at him, a nag of unease starts to prickle at the space behind his eyes.

This is his Eren, the Eren he knows. He doesn’t question this, but there’s something about him that looks _wrong_ in a way he can’t identify.

He’s not sure that it’s the strangeness of his surroundings, anymore. The light from outside has been gentled by thick curtains and the ambience it lends the air reminds him too much of the room of an invalid or a dying man, but he doesn’t know that it’s that.

The walls are painted a sort of noncommittal blue, pale and clear like the sky after a storm, and it makes him think of all the beautiful mornings he watched people die on, but he’s not sure that seeing Eren silhouetted against it is the source of his growing itch.

He tells himself that it must be- that Eren looks darker and wilder and altogether _more_ because everything around him is so crisp and sterile.

Eren is watching him. There’s not just patience in the set of his expression, but relief.

And wonder, maybe, though Levi doesn’t know why.

He swallows again, gritting his teeth to keep from flinching.

“Did you close the breach?”

He’s not even really sure what it’s the first question he asks. He saw it happen, but then, he saw Eren disappear while it did, and yet here he is.

Here they both are.

“Yeah,” Eren confirms. “It’s closed.”

He’s somehow uncomfortably aware that the uncertain silence which follows isn’t what Eren had been expecting from this conversation, but the weird little smile that pulls at his lips tells him that it isn’t a disappointment, at least.

He looks like he wants to say something, but all that leaves him is another soft,

“Hey.”

Levi looks at him, torn between his own disquiet and Eren’s apparent sense of ease. “Where are we?” he asks, finally.

“Somewhere safe,” Eren assures him cryptically.

He looks like there’s so much he wants to say. He says nothing.

“Where’s Erwin?” Levi probes. “Hanji? They’ll want to know how we survived in that-” He tries to gesture and then remembers the restraints. “That crystal shit. I’m surprised they’re not already here. I don’t know who stopped them from poking at me while I was unconscious, but whoever they are, I need to thank them,” he muttered, feeling a strange need to fill the pregnant silence.

Eren has his eyebrows furrowed and his lips pulled back from his teeth like he’s just discovered he’s in terrible pain.

Levi frowned. “The hell is that look for?” When Eren doesn’t answer immediately, he shifts uneasily. “Did you shit yourself?”

Eren laughs just the same way he did the first time Levi made a joke in front of him, too startled to be anything but breathless, but his pained expression only worsens.

“Captain-” he starts, and then clenches his teeth, closing his eyes for a moment. “It’s… been a while.”

Levi raises his eyebrows at him.

Eren’s tongue darts uncertainly over his lips. “We were in the crystal for… a while.”

“A while,” Levi repeats drily. “How long is ‘a while’? Months? Years? Has everyone we know gotten old and fat without us?” he asks, only half-joking. “Hanji must be dead if they’re not here to bother me.” He doesn’t like the thought, so he pretends it didn’t happen. “Are we in Maria, then? Is this how they’re rebuilding it?” He wrinkles his nose in distaste.

Eren’s voice is very subdued. “We’re not in Maria.” When Levi frowns at him, he hesitates and then crosses to the window. “Look, I wanted to be able to put you in a chair, but you roughed up a couple of people, so they won’t let me transfer you until they know you’re not going to do it again. You’ll… have to make do from there.”

He sounds genuinely sorry.

Whatever words were forming on Levi’s lips about the unlikelihood of not doing it again die the second he sees what’s behind the curtain.

He’s dimly aware of Eren watching him.

In the bright rectangle of the window, there are buildings.

Buildings as far as he can see, and beyond that, what might be water.

Buildings, but-

“Where’s the wall?” he mumbles.

He thinks Eren might be smiling. Or crying. He’s not sure which.

“There is no wall.”

Levi squints at him, at a loss.

“This is what I mean when I say,” Eren tells him quietly, “ ‘it’s been a while.’ ”

***

It doesn’t take him more than a couple of hours to form some nebulous suspicions about Eren.

As he watches him talk quietly with one of the people staffing the facility, he doesn’t understand the language, but he does know that the words coming from Eren’s mouth are too fluid, too sure.

If it was Arlert, he might make allowances- the boy is known for his various aptitudes.

  _‘Was known. Was,’_ he thinks suddenly, and feels strange. He keeps forgetting. It seems impossible.

They were all so young.

When the woman in the pale green uniform gives Eren a respectfully final nod and throws Levi one last cautious look before slipping out of the room, he brushes away his reverie.

“How long?” he asks briskly, in no mood for pleasantries.

Eren startles and then shoots him a slightly puzzled smile. “Captain, I wasn’t lying to you when I said I’m not sure. They told me the record-keeping during the Wall Exit-” It’s a strange phrase, one he’s obviously taken pains to translate into their mother tongue by himself. It’s this phrase that first stirred Levi’s suspicions. “-was really inconsistent for at least a couple hundred years, they just don’t-”

“No,” Levi interrupts, “how long have you been-” He stops to consider the appropriate word and settles on the simplest. “How long have you been awake?”

He can already see a dozen ways that question could be deflected by a little feigned confusion, but he’s caught Eren enough by surprise that his reaction is blank first, guilty second.

He’s still gathering his words when Levi gets tired of waiting. “Eren, you’re not stupid,” he tells him frankly, “and neither am I, but unless I’ve underestimated you more than I honestly think is possible, neither of us could learn a new language well enough to speak like you do in less than a year. Longer, maybe.” He studies the way his cheeks have lost the fatty thickness of adolescence, marks the way the skin around his mouth and jaw has been roughened by the seeds of what looks like it would grow in as a full and well-formed beard. “How long?” he repeats.

Eren swallows. The look in his eyes is so young that Levi almost regrets asking.

“Five years,” he answers reluctantly, and all at once Levi understands why he is reluctant. “It took me a long time to convince them it was worth it to try and chip you out.” His mouth works pensively for a moment. “You’re not a titan shifter- we weren’t even sure you’d be alive. I just had to know.”

Were he less preoccupied, Levi might recognize the,

_‘I just had to hope,’_

Eren has left unsaid, but as it is, he barely notices the apologetic slant of his tone.

His thoughts have run aground on one particular triviality.

“So you’re, what, twenty-two now?” The way Eren’s arms and chest and shoulders have thickened seems to suggest this. The way the corner of his jaw has graduated from soft curve to hard angle almost confirms it. He still finds himself struggling with the concept. “And I’m,” he mumbles, furrowing his eyebrows, “still… as old as I was.”

Somehow, verbalizing it makes it even more difficult to comprehend.

“Heh. Ah, what the fuck?” He wishes his arms weren’t still restrained. He has a strong desire to cradle his head in his hands. “Everyone I know is dead- except for you- and everything I’ve ever known about the world is suddenly different. Even the fucking words people say are different.” He looks down at his cloth-covered knees angrily. “So why is this so hard for me to deal with? It doesn’t even _mean_ anything,” he mutters.

He can hear the rueful smile in Eren’s voice. “If it makes you feel any better, you’re handling this a lot better than I did.”

Levi shoots him an inquisitive glance.

Eren’s grin is every bit as rueful as he’d expected. “When I woke up, I… sort of went into shock,” he explains. “I don’t know the word for it in our language- I think maybe I used to, but I don’t anymore-” His tone is light, but Levi can tell it bothers him. “But I… for about a year or so, I’d just…”

Levi frowns at his hesitation.

“I’d just slip in and out, y’know? Sometimes I’d walk in circles for no reason, or pick things up and put them down in the same place, over and over again- and sometimes I’d mimic people or... just stare at nothing.” Levi jerks up to look at him so quickly that it makes it his neck ache. “When I was… awake? When I was _myself_ , anyway, sometimes I’d remember doing it, but mostly I wouldn’t. I kind of remember some of the sensations, maybe- people touching my back or my shoulder when they told me to sit or stand, people touching my cheek when they told me to chew and my throat when they told me to swallow.” He laughs, but it’s strange and hollow. “Kinda fucked up, right?”

Eren lifts his head, but his smile fades the moment they make eye contact.

Levi can feel his face doing something terrible. He can barely breathe around the knot in his throat.

“You were _catatonic?”_ he croaks.

Bizarrely, Eren’s expression flickers and then brightens.

“ _Yes,_ ” he says much too eagerly. “Yes, yes- that’s the word, that’s-”

Abruptly, Eren looks like he might cry. Levi tenses as he scrubs at one of his eyes and swallows thickly.

“Sorry, I- it’s just- it’s been driving me nuts because when I forget a word, it’s just _gone_ and there hasn’t been anyone around to remember it for me for _years_ and it makes me feel like I’m slowly losing something I can’t get back,” he babbles.

The tears are flowing freely, now.

Levi watches them gather on Eren’s chin and feels an old, unpleasant sense of helplessness.

“I was so afraid they were going to pull you out and you were going to be dead,” Eren whispers, not looking at him, not really looking anywhere. “Sometimes I think it’s my fault they took so long to get you out- as long as you were in there I could tell myself you were alive and I wasn’t alone without having to risk that not being true. I was so afraid, Captain.”

“Fucking hell, Eren,” Levi mutters. “I don’t- the hell am I supposed to say to that? You know I’m shit at this,” he accuses haltingly.

Eren laughs. It’s an odd, watery sound. “You don’t have to say anything,” he murmurs, irises almost eerily bright against the fast-reddening whites of his eyes. “You’re here.” He looks like he might start crying again. “You’re here.”

Levi sighs, torn between sympathy and exasperation.

“Yeah, I’m here,” he assures, hoping it’ll stem the tide of Eren’s sobbing.

It does not.


End file.
